Read it.

The 2000s shift from capitalism to ‘Cloudism,’ described in Yannis Varoufakis’s Techno-feudalism: What Killed Capitalism as a shift from terrestrial capital to so-called ‘Cloud capital,’ was already augured by manual labour’s representing less of the economy than digital labour and by the prominence of the virtual implying less of the actual. Of course, in a sense, ideas have always represented the bulk of value, so this is nothing new, nor is it problematic as such. The problem lies elsewhere.

OffGuardian.

Shocking evidence is emerging from Australia and New Zealand of how the climate scam is being used to impose a techno-totalitarian smart-city future.

The criminocratic global imperialists often use their Commonwealth colonies to try out the most insidious escalations of their tyranny – think of Canada, New Zealand and Australia during Covid.

We can therefore assume that this is going to be the blueprint for the roll-out of their Fourth Industrial Revolution agenda across the world.

I love the smell of conspiracy in the morning.

Read it.

For decades, the dominant narrative has been that carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from human activities are driving catastrophic climate change. This view, heavily promoted by the United Nations (UN), reached a fever pitch in 2018 when the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) declared that humanity had only twelve years to avert a climate disaster. However, this alarmist perspective is increasingly challenged by a significant number of scientists and professionals who argue that there is no climate emergency; and that climate change is not caused by CO2 emissions, nor by emissions from livestock, such as cows.

One of the most notable refutations comes from the Climate Intelligence Foundation (CLINTEL). Established in 2019 by Dutch geophysics professor Guus Berkhout, CLINTEL has amassed over 1,850 signatories, including Nobel laureates and leading climate experts, who have signed the World Climate Declaration.

One of the liabilities of modern communications is that it makes it far too easy for kooks to connect with each other and assemble to do kooky things. Recent activities by ‘climate protesters’ (not to be confused, apparently, with ‘gravity protesters’) illustrate this defect quite appropriately.

The Foundry.

Our economic leadership often is discussed by way of dollars, but it’s about much more than that. It’s about the well-being of the American people.

The economy has one purpose—to organize our labors to produce the goods and services that households need and desire. After all, the root word of economics refers to the household, which is the foundation of society.

Horseshit.

THE ECONOMY HAS NO PURPOSE. ‘Purpose’ is a notion that applies ONLY to a designed thing, a constructed thing, a thing artificially created by an intelligent agent with a planned end in mind; that planned end is its purpose. One of the most accurate things one can say about a purpose is that it sometimes succeeds but often doesn’t.

The Economy is a self-organizing system that occurs as the result of individual phenomena that may themselves have purpose but the combination of which does not have a purpose. What such systems have are functions, which is ‘what they do’ as opposed to purpose, which is ‘what they are supposed to do’. Hayek and Mises spent their lives writing about this sort of thing, and I encourage you to read what they had to say.

The distinguishing characteristic of self-organizing systems (like The Economy) is that they ‘work’ whether you want them to or not. Thus any politically-motivated interference in such a system (which interference appears to be the theme song of modern politics) always and everywhere has unintended consequences that the interferers (if that isn’t a word, it ought to be) seldom anticipate and are always so surprised to encounter.

So anyone who starts by discussing ‘the purpose of the economy’ is intellectually defective in the same way that people who think that their politically-motivated interference in the economy will do what they want and nothing else are intellectually defective.

Feel free to read the article and agree or disagree with it as the spirit moves you, but bear this essential distinction in mind and take what the author says with a shaker of salt.

Read it.

Even though four years have passed, new information continues to leak out about the 51 supposed intelligence officials who signed a statement in 2020 declaring that the story about Hunter Biden’s laptop had “all the hallmarks” of a Russian disinformation campaign. Joe Biden would go on to cite those officials during a debate with Donald Trump. Of course, the laptop was real and they all knew it the entire time, leading some outlets like the New York Post to dub them, “the spies who lie.” The lies have apparently not ended yet, however. Newly revealed documents show that at least two of the officials were employed as CIA contractors at the time that the letter was created. Former CIA acting director Michael Morell and ex-CIA Inspector General David Buckley were under contract to the agency. Yet when they were contacted to ask about that relationship, they both either denied it or refused to comment. (NY Post)

Read it.

And you’re paying money for this.

Read it.

Down the Memory Hole!

I remember having the hots for Martha Quinn back in the day. Good times.

Read it.

U.S. authorities have virtually sealed any illuminating information about the recent FBI counterterrorism arrest of eight ISIS-tied Tajikistani nationals who crossed the southwest border a year ago. They were quickly freed amid the ongoing mass migration flood and claimed asylum. Federal law enforcement acted after a wiretap investigation intercepted communications that detected links to the Tajik-led ISIS-K terrorist group in Afghanistan and chatter about bombs and violent religious ideology. Though we are short of further details about the ISIS links and jihad talk, the initial arrests on immigration charges of border-crossing Tajik immigrants who were quickly freed at the border and got rolled up in a major counterterrorism dragnet constitute a momentous wake-up call that portends public policy consequences.

Read it.

Massachusetts has dispatched a team of officials to the southern border in Texas to dissuade migrants in federal custody from traveling to the state, according to a new report.

Staff from Gov. Maura Healey’s (D-MA) administration are heading to four Texas cities, Brownsville, Hidalgo, McAllen, and San Antonio, to meet with migrants, federal law enforcement, and nonprofit groups to express concerns that shelters up north are at capacity and cannot accommodate more migrants, according to a statement shared with CBS News Tuesday.

“This trip is an important opportunity to meet with families arriving in the U.S. and the organizations that work with them at the border to make sure they have accurate information about the lack of shelter space in Massachusetts,” Gen. Scott Rice, the state’s shelter crisis director, said in a statement.

Now that Governor Greg Abbott has gone all DEI on the border problem, previously sanctimonious blue states are realizing that their butts are in the wringer as well, and it appears to be concentrating their minds wonderfully.

Read it.

Only weeks before a major UK election, Google Ads reportedly censored an anti-globalist political party.

The Reform UK Party found itself suddenly targeted without explanation by Google Ads some two weeks before the July 4 election. While Google did apparently make tacit acknowledgment of a mistake, quickly reversing the censorship, it provides another sobering illustration of Google’s constant election meddling and interference not just in England, but around the world.

Read it.

The Kenyan capital of Nairobi has descended into violence and mayhem as large street protests by Kenyans outraged at new tax policies and a harsh ‘Eco-Austerity’ program imposed by the government have resulted in the parliament building being set on fire.

Legislators are evacuating after the anti-tax protesters initially breached parliament. They quickly overwhelmed police soon after the lawmakers voted to pass a bill which introduces new nationwide taxes, including an eco-levy which raises the price of basic goods such as diapers, as part of efforts to curb waste management and be more environmentally friendly.

The problem with African WaBenzi is that they pay too much attention to their fellow transnational globalists and too little attention to their own people.

ZMan does a deep dive.

The main reason the Cold War did not end in nuclear annihilation is that the two great managerial systems institutionalized communications in such a way that it became a specialty with career opportunities. In Russia, being an expert in some aspect of America meant a good life as a member of the new class. In America, having some expertise on Russia meant a comfortable life in the clouds. The Cold War standoff became a jobs program for both sides.

The selection pressure on both sides was for second and third order thinking, as both sides had an investment in the status quo. Foreign policy advisors in America thought about the downstream consequences of their recommendations because it could have a direct impact on their employment prospects. Similarly, on the Russian side, the pressure was always there to think about how the Americans would react as getting that wrong could mean being posted to the Urals.

This is what makes the present so dangerous. Washington’s proxy war with Russia lacks both the incentives to prevent escalation and the sorts of people who see it as their purpose to prevent escalation. Washington has cut off communications with Moscow and works to prevent others from developing their own channels. Europe has little contact now with Russia. The primary goal of Washington is to isolate Moscow, which means isolating the West from the world.

Democrats always subordinate foreign policy to their domestic agenda of getting more votes and winning more elections and staying in power and keeping those government paychecks rolling in. If it means increasing the dangers of war, so what?

Read it.

Police say a man tried to sexually assault a woman in Central Park on Monday.

In broad daylight.

Time to leave.

Read it.

Thank you, Joe Biden.

“Leftism might actually be noble if their concern for the marginalized wasn’t simply an incidental externality to their seething hatred of the normal and the good.”

– David Pivtorak on “X”

Read it.

A Department of Homeland Security (DHS) ‘Experts Group’ that included deep state ‘laptop letter’ partisans James Clapper and John Brennan, advocated using Jan. 6 and the Mar-a-Lago raid to justify expanding surveillance of political dissent.

This latest bombshell comes from America First Legal, which is suing the Biden DHS along with former acting DNI Richard Grenell over the September 2023 formation of the “Homeland Intelligence Experts Group,” which they have accused of violating the Federal Advisory Committee Act due to lack of balance and transparency.

Read it.

On Sunday afternoon, a anti-Semitic, pro-Hamas mob went hunting for Jews near a Los Angeles, California synagogue and Jewish neighborhood, infringing on the right of Jews to live and worship in peace. Along with allowing the terrorist sympathizers to occupy both sides of the street, the scene descended into violence, as exhibited by videos from the scene.

Given this mob wasn’t the same makeup of the white, tiki-torch totting losers who descended on Charlottesville in 2017, ABC, CBS omitted any mention of this during their Sunday night and Monday morning newscasts. NBC wasn’t much better with only 13 seconds on Monday’s Today (and Sunday’s NBC Nightly News having been preempted).

Jonathan Turley.

In 1976, Saul Steinburg’s hilarious “View of the World from 9th Avenue” was published on the cover of the New Yorker. The map showed Manhattan occupying most of the known world with wilderness on the other side of the Hudson River between New York and San Francisco. The cartoon captured the distorted view New Yorkers have of the rest of the country.

When I was at Yale a large number of students had this framed on their walls.

Roughly 50 years later, the image has flipped for many. With the Trump trial, Manhattan has become a type of legal wilderness where prosecutors use the legal system to hunt down political rivals and thrill their own supporters. New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) ran on a pledge to bag former president Donald Trump. (She also sought to dissolve the National Rifle Association.)

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg also pledged to get Trump. Neither specified how they would do it, but both were elected and both were lionized for bringing controversial cases against Trump.

Read it.

Wolves at a popular wildlife park near Paris reportedly attacked and critically injured a woman jogger who had wandered into the cars-only area.

Think of it as evolution in action.

Wolves are agents of natural selection since they only subtract the weak and the stupid.

ZMan scratches his head.

One of the things about the modern age is that the public statements from the centers of cultural production and the institutions are often contradictory. The most obvious are the statements about “defending democracy” which almost always come when an election goes against the beautiful people. Their preferred candidate or party loses and all of a sudden, the democratic result is declared a threat to democracy. It happens so often now that people no longer bother to laugh at it.

It’s always obvious that the ‘our’ in ‘our democracy’ doesn’t include you and me.

Read it.

In the past year we have discussed on multiple occasions that US labor market data has been repeatedly doctored to artificially appear better than it really is (see “Here Is The “Unexpected” Reason Why The Fed Will Rush To Cut Rates As Soon As Possible”, “Philadelphia Fed Admits US Payrolls Overstated By At Least 800,000” and “Here Comes The Job Shock: Philadelphia Fed Admits US Jobs “Overstated” By At Least 1.1 Million”), although thanks to a quirk of BLS data revision reporting, we won’t have definitive proof of just how ugly the real job market has been in recent years until some time in 2025, well into Trump’s second administration.

However, while the BLS will be able to maintain the facade of “strong job gains” lies into early 2025, the dismal reality has already made an appearance in America’s largest labor market.

According to the latest report published by the non-partisan California Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO) which is an agency of the California government, is overseen by the Joint Legislative Budget Committee of the California State Legislature, and performs and publishes extensive analyses of the state’s budget in addition to providing fiscal and policy advice to the California Legislature, contrary to prior reports of over substantial job gains in the deep blue state in 2023, the reality was far uglier.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

I wonder what it’s like living in a country where government employees don’t seem to think that their jobs consist of lying to people all of the time.

Gothamist.

A fatal stabbing inside a bodega in Queens on Saturday night reignited calls from some shop owners for more state and federal assistance with security measures.

Police said a man was fatally stabbed inside a bodega on Jamaica Avenue around 9:40 p.m. on Saturday. Responding officers found the victim unconscious with multiple stab wounds to the neck and shoulder, and EMS pronounced him dead at the scene, the NYPD said.

Police said no arrests had been made as of Sunday afternoon, and the investigation remains ongoing.

Read it.

Like all progressive groups, The Satanic Temple came out in support of Black Lives Matter.

The Satanic Temple, which distinguishes itself from its rival, The Church of Satan, through its rigorously progressive politics while accusing The Church of Satan of libertarianism, put out a statement by co-founder Lucien Greaves that blasted President Trump and accused the police of randomly killing black people that could have come from any random leftist organization.

Read it.

There may be liberty under a right monarchy: there has come a sort of slavery under the democracies of the modern form where a political oligarchy and a money oligarchy, now in alliance, now in conflict, have brought about grave disorder, social chaos, and the negation of the free and the good life, under the forms of a free commonwealth founded on assumptions that are baseless biologically, philosophically, historically, and from the standpoint of plain commonsense.

—Ralph Adams Cram, Invitation to Monarchy

If the right people are in charge, any system will work well; if the wrong people are in charge, no system will work well. This is why we can never have nice things.

Read it.

“If you’re really wealthy, you will send your kids to private schools. So who’s stuck in failing neighborhood schools? Poor kids. A lot of them minority kids. So how can you say you’re for civil rights? How can you say you’re for the poor when you’re condemning those children to not being able to read by the time they’re in third grade?

“They’re never going to read. So if you want to say that school choice and vouchers and charter schools are destroying the public schools, fine. You write that editorial in The Washington Post, but then don’t send your kids to Sidwell Friends.”

Sidwell Friends is the expensive woke private school where AlGore and Obama sent their kids.

Say the quiet part out loud: The Crust requires a ‘public’ school system that will keep their sustaining Underclass illiterate and innumerate so that they will remain on the Democrat-government benefits plantation.

Newsbusters.

The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, an anti-free speech, Soros-funded organization, spearheaded a new letter claiming that Big Tech companies must “protect voters” from so-called “disinformation.”

Other anti-free speech groups co-signed the effort and over a third of the groups signing the letter were Soros-funded. The letter was addressed to the CEOs of Google, Meta, X, TikTok, Snap, Reddit, Instagram, YouTube and Twitch.

In it, the groups proposed multiple censorship measures to silence free speech they disagree with — all while artificially promoting content they approve.

Read it.

As our society descends into chaos, vast numbers of people are choosing to pull the plug and walk away. Of course it is nearly impossible to completely escape the ubiquitous madness that is seemingly all around us, but many are finding that an “off grid” lifestyle gives them the best opportunity to insulate themselves as much as possible. When you become less dependent on the system, what happens to the system has less of an impact on you. Unfortunately, it appears that our system is heading into a full-blown meltdown, and a significant portion of the population is feverishly making preparations in anticipation of what is coming.

Read it.

Fox News’ Bill Melugin shared with X users several headlines from this week alone that shows illegal aliens committing heinous acts of rape and murder against young American women.

On Thursday, Melugin said here are three headlines since the weekend:

Salvadoran illegal alien charged w/ rape & murder of Rachel Morin. Entered as gotaway last year.

Ecuadorian illegal alien charged w/ rape & kidnapping of 13-year-old girl in NYC. Caught & released in 2021.

Two Venezuelan illegal aliens charged w/ murdering 12-year-old Jocelyn Nungaray in Houston. Both caught and released at the border this year.

Read it.

Hours after Hamas-backed fighters broke out of the fence surrounding Gaza and embarked on a crusade of rape, killing, and kidnapping throughout southern Israel, some American corporate activists began their crusade to legitimize all of it.

Notably among their ranks were advocates of the boycott, divest, and sanctions movement.

“Oppression is the root cause of violence,” wrote the BDS movement in a statement released on Oct. 7, offering praise to the “powerful armed reaction of the oppressed Palestinians in Gaza” and making no mention of the deaths of nearly 1,200 innocent Israelis, or Hamas, the group that made it all happen.

Watch it.

Nomad Capitalist says the quiet part out loud.

Reuters.

Record border crossings are a major issue in November’s US presidential election, with more migrants coming from around the world. Inside two new routes that take Indians and Africans via Central America.

The reason this works, and why people are willing to pay that much, is that they know the Biden administration refuses to enforce the immigration laws.

Read it.

The Canary Islands is facing an unprecedented migration crisis, with the number of illegal migrants set to trump the previous record from last year. In the first five and a half months of this year, almost 19,000 people from Western Africa arrived on the Spanish islands by sea, an increase of 221% compared to the same period in 2023. Last year’s number of migrants—39,900—was a record in itself, an increase of 155% compared to 2022, and the record is likely to be broken again.

According to a recent report by Frontex, the EU’s Border and Coast Guard Agency, there is an increased demand from sub-Saharan migrants seeking to enter the European Union via the Canary Islands, and human smugglers are taking advantage of the situation. Most of the boats carrying the migrants depart from Morocco, Mauritania, and Senegal.

For the small Spanish island group that lies 100 kilometres to the west of Morocco and Western Sahara, with a population of 2.2 million, it is an unbearable situation, as it is finding it difficult to cope with the influx of people. “We don’t have enough resources to take care of them,” says Canarian President Fernando Clavijo.

Read it.

Last week, Hungary was ordered by the EU’s top court to pay a fine of 200 million euros as well as a daily penalty of 1 million euros for not implementing changes to its migration policy as required by the EU court in previous judgements.

In its decision, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) classified the Hungarian migration measures as “unprecedented and exceptionally serious” infringements of EU law that “undermine in a particularly serious manner both the public interest and the interests of third-country nationals”. One gets the feeling that the EU judiciary is simply living in a parallel universe.

First, the cynical decision to only announce Hungary’s punishment after the European parliamentary elections speaks for itself. The CJEU obviously didn’t want people to cast their vote after hearing about this scandalous decision.

Read it.

Six years after California legalized marijuana, the bodies keep piling up. Earlier this year, six men were murdered in the Mojave desert. Four of the Latino men had been burned after being shot with rifles. In 2020, seven people were killed at an illegal pot operation in Riverside County.

Violence like this was supposed to disappear after legalization. Legalization advocates argued that making the drug trade legal would end the grip of the cartels. Instead the legal market has failed and the cartels are taking over sizable parts of California and the rest of the country.

California’s legal drug revenues have fallen consistently as have those in other legal drug states including Colorado whose model helped sell the idea that drug money would fix everything.

Read it.

The president of the German Teachers Association has warned that the country’s education system is being overwhelmed with migrant students, many of whom are illiterate and can barely speak the language.

Read it.

California has become a test case of the suicide of the West. Never before has such a state, so rich in natural resources and endowed with such a bountiful human inheritance, self-destructed so rapidly.

Read it.

Dramatic new video shows the latest ramming incident between Chinese and Philippine vessels in a contested area of the South China Sea, and it reveals clear escalation which involved the Chinese side clearly brandishing weapons.

The incident happened near the Second Thomas Shoal on Monday, where the Philippine military has troops stationed as part of its claim on the Spratly Islands (also claimed by Beijing). Manilla officials said their military vessels were en route there on a normal ‘humanitarian resupply’ mission when the boats were deliberately rammed and boxed in by Chinese coast guard ships.

Read it.

Fifteen people were shot during a Juneteenth celebration in Oakland, California, police said Thursday.

The violence broke out Wednesday night during an event at Lake Merritt that was largely peaceful, with as many as 5,000 in attendance, until a sideshow involving “motorbikes and vehicles” took place around 8:15 p.m. on the north side of the lake.

A fight broke out down the street from the sideshow and a crowd gathered in the area of the fight, police said. At least one person was taken into custody for assaulting an officer.

Time to leave.

ZMan points out some problems.

One of the consequences of youth culture is that there is not a lot of thought put into the fitness of old people. What little there is on the subject is either aimed at peddling drugs or peddling the crackpot idea that you are as young as you feel. The former looks at the swelling population of geezers the same way they looked at Covid. They are just looking for a way to steal more money. The latter tends to promote activities that have dubious fitness benefits and mostly sell good vibes.

The main reason for this is Americans are terrible at being old. The obsession with youth is a core part of the culture. Every political cycle, billions of words are wasted on what the youth have to say about things, as if being young makes you wise and smart, when in reality you are at your dumbest when young. Of course, young people are encouraged to set new trends and then old people are encouraged to adopt those trends so they can pretend to be young.

This was not always the way. For most of human history, youth was a thing humans were quickly ushered through so that they could become productive members of the family and community. Once children could do useful things, they were put on a course to learn to be an adult. In the modern age, it is the reverse. Once someone hits the age of majority, they are put on a course to maintain the illusion of perpetual youth in order to avoid thinking much about what comes after youth.

Power Line.

This month has seen a series of arson attacks on the University of California, Berkeley campus. Yesterday a suspect was arrested. The culprit is a walking stereotype.

Read it.

Not to mention becoming an incipient totalitarian hellhole.

Canada’s defense minister Bill Blair has declared, by strangely including future spending on its arctic surveillance network, that “I believe it brings us inevitably to over 2 per cent of defence spending.” This is an old Canadian trick of appealing to American anxieties of missile attack, satisfying the Canadian public’s fantasies about an Arctic presence, and avoiding deploying anything larger than a brigade, anywhere, ever. The official NATO estimate of Canada’s defense effort is only 1.33% of GDP. Canada is currently the world’s ninth largest economy, and the most productive major manufacturer committed to unilateral disarmament. A combination of incipient anti-Americanism, which creeps in as early as grade school history education, coupled with a federal government focused narrowly on the material well-being of Canadians, disincentivizes political leadership from spending political capital on international relations. From the perspective of a Canadian, U.S. politics oscillates wildly from expensive international engagement to isolationist hostility against international norms and institutions.

Read it.

Dramatic footage has surfaced on X showing a Juneteenth celebration in Oakland, California, which was transformed into a warzone in the overnight hours. What appears to be gang-on-gang violence sparked an insane shootout on city streets. In a state governed by radical leftist Gavin Newsom, where common sense law and order are seemingly absent, such scenes are becoming more frequent. This incident further exemplifies why people and businesses continue to flee to safer, red states.

Local media outlet SFGate reported that as many as 5,000 people attended the Juneteenth celebration in Oakland’s Lake Merritt area.

Around 2015 local time, a fight broke out at a sideshow involving “motorbikes and vehicles” at Grand and Bellevue avenues—and that was the moment when all hell erupted.

Read it.

The Fort Belknap Indian Reservation sits just 40 miles from the Canadian border, but threats to its sovereignty—and to tribal members’ lives—are coming all the way from Mexico.

A rising cartel presence—bringing increased drugs and violence to a community that already had plenty of both—has left some tribal members believing that the White House has all but left them behind.

“The Biden administration’s Bureau of Indian Affairs treats us worse than white people do,” said Jeffrey Stiffarm, who serves as president of the Fort Belknap Indian community. “We’re not getting no help from the FBI, Border Patrol, none of them have stepped up with more money and resources, and the cartels know this.”

Read it.

President Biden is making gun control a central part of his reelection campaign. In a new ad, Biden says that Trump did “nothing” when children were “gunned down in classrooms,” innocent people “killed in church,” and others “massacred at a concert.”

The Biden campaign is referring to shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida; First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas; and an outdoor concert in Las Vegas. In four years, there were 18 mass shootings that occurred in public places and that did not transpire during another crime such as robbery or selling drugs. (A “mass killing” is defined by criminologists as involving four or more fatalities, not counting the shooter.)

But 23 mass public shootings have occurred so far under Biden – a 50% higher annual rate than under Trump. The deadliest shooting resulted in 21 victims at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas – four more than were killed in Parkland.

Read it.

One of these days people are just going to start shooting these dimwits.

Read it.

Ecuador is suspending a visa agreement with China amid a “worrying increase” in arrivals who are using the South American country as a jumpoff point to begin their northbound journey to the United States to take advantage of the criminally open border.

How many of them are Red Chinese sleeper agents?

Read it.

A record number of millionaires are expected to leave the country this year, according to a new migration report published on Tuesday by Henley & Partners. The consultancy, which looked at data from 150,000 high-net-worth individuals, estimates that the U.K. will lose a staggering 9,500 people who own at least $1 million or more in liquid assets. For context, that’s more than double the 4,200 lost in 2023. The outflow is partly due to political uncertainty and the possibility of higher taxes under a new Labour government, pending the results of the country’s upcoming general election on July 4.

“These figures reflect a steady accumulation of factors detracting from the U.K.’s appeal to high-net-worth individuals,” Hannah White, CEO of the Institute for Government, wrote in the report. “The hangover from Brexit continues to be felt, with the City of London no longer seen as the financial center of the world.”

Read it.

An illegal migrant from Ecuador has been arrested by the NYPD following a broad daylight rape in which police say a man wielding a machete approached two 13-year-olds in a Queens park, a boy and a girl – tied them together by the wrists, and then raped the girl. He allegedly then stole their cell phones and ran off.

ZMan looks behind the curtain.

It is fair to say that Detroit was one of the first victims of the civil rights revolution, given what happened to it relative to where it was pre-revolution. After the war, Detroit was the most prosperous city in the country. In 1950 the city had 1.8 million people and the highest per capita income in the country. Then the civil rights revolution unleashed hell on the city, leading to a collapse of its economy and population. Motown is now roughly a third of its peak size and gripped by urban poverty.

Despite remaining the symbol of the urban decline unleashed by the civil rights revolution, Detroit is not the worst city in America. St. Louis continues to sport the highest murder rate in the country at 66 per 100,000. Baltimore is always the bridesmaid in the murder Olympics at a respectable 56 per 100,000. Detroit is third, but the murder rate is 40 per 100,000. That is still ten times worse than the most dangerous European cities, but well off the pace in America.

Quillette.

By now, you probably know that plastic recycling is a scam. If not, this white paper lays out the case in devastating detail. To summarise, amid calls to reduce plastic garbage in the 1970s and ’80s, the petrochemical industry put forth recycling as a red herring to create the appearance of a solution while it continued to make as much plastic as it pleased. Multiple paper trails indicate that industry leaders knew from the start that recycling could never work at scale. And indeed, it hasn’t. Only about nine percent of plastic worldwide gets recycled, and the US manages only about six percent.